Jimmy Kimmel
Jimmy Kimmel mocked his typical target, Donald Trump, for Trump’s return to typical form: campaigning for president, with stops for his 2024 bid in New Hampshire and South Carolina over the weekend.
Kimmel played several clips in which the former president ranted about the threat of windmills, and mimed knocking one over. “He’s literally Don Quixote. It’s not even a metaphor any more,” Kimmel said. “He’s battling windmills. I mean, I guess if I had a combover like that, I wouldn’t like windmills either? But it’s too much.”
Trump also called the National Archives a “radical left organization” because of, as Kimmel facetiously put it, “their extremist leftwing, antifa agenda of collecting and preserving government documents as required by law”.
“Think about this: if your grandfather went around shouting about killer windmills and Marxist librarians, you’d send them to a place, right?” he said. “I have to say, watching him out there campaigning again – it’s kind of sad. It’s the political equivalent of when Michael Jordan went to play for the Wizards.”
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert openly refused to heed the advice of a Huff Post headline that read “it’s time to stop talking about George Santos.”
“Wrong,” said Colbert, “because the hits just keep on coming,” as a new report found that several of Santos’s campaign donors appear to not exist. Victoria and Jonathan Regor, for example, could not be located anywhere in the US, and their listed address in New Jersey doesn’t exist. “So bad news, he might have committed fraud,” Colbert said. “Good news, one less place that exists in New Jersey.”
Colbert also refused to stop talking about Santos’s spotlight-courting in DC, where he was spotted at a karaoke bar last week. Santos declined to sing but reportedly said his preferred karaoke song was I Will Survive. “That is of course the disco classic, recorded in 1978 by George Santos,” Colbert joked.
“But if you do want to hear George Santos sing his lying heart out, you are in luck,” as reporters have found what appears to be Santos’s old account on the singing app Smule, which includes his renditions of Hallelujah, the Pitch Perfect song Cups and Frozen’s Let It Go.
“According to Santos, those recordings earned him a Tony, a Grammy, a Purple Heart and the Nobel prize for volleyball,” Colbert quipped.
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers dove into the deja vu that is Republicans’ refusal to take Trump’s 2024 bid seriously enough to stop him. “They all want to pretend that Trump and his gang of weirdos are done, but they also don’t think they have a future without them,” Meyers explained. “For example, on the one hand, they keep insisting over and over that Trump is the past and that he can’t win a general election.
“The parallels between how the GOP is treating Trump now and how they treated him in 2016 are pretty alarming,” he added, as Republicans insisted that Trump could not get through the primaries, and could never be elected, while still supporting him. “This is what keeps happening with Trump: Republicans just assume he’s done, and that someone else will take him down, but no one actually does it.”
Meyers quoted Terry Sullivan, who ran Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaign and told the Atlantic: “There’s an old quote, ‘When your enemy is in the process of drowning, throw him a brick’ … None of Donald Trump’s opponents ever have the balls to throw him the damn brick. They just hope someone else will.
“It doesn’t even have to be that heavy of a brick!” Meyers exclaimed. “If Donald Trump were actually in the water, I’m pretty sure all it would take is to throw him a pebble to sink him. You could throw him a pillow, even – though not a MyPillow, those things are probably heavier. That’s like 50 bricks.”
The Daily Show
For Black people, the Tyre Nichols video wasn't shocking. It was a flashback. @RealDLHughley pic.twitter.com/LYeCRycWBb
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) January 31, 2023
And on the Daily Show, guest host DL Hughley responded to the harrowing video footage of five Memphis police officers beating Tyre Nichols, a Black man, to death. Hughley referenced media reports of the “shocking” footage, released by the Memphis police department on Friday. “You know who wasn’t shocked by that? Black people,” he said.
“The only people who were probably shocked by this were people who were not paying attention. But for us, that’s just a flashback,” he added. “Those videos are so commonplace, it’s hard to be shocked. That’s like watching a porno and saying, ‘he’s going to stick that where?’
“You can’t be shocked when also the media spent the whole week prepping us for the video,” he added, joking that the video “got more promo than I did for this show”.
“It was like they were rolling out a new movie release – brought to you from the people that brought you George Floyd and Rodney King.”
What Hughley did find shocking was how fast the five officers were arrested. “They got arrested so fast they didn’t even give us time to riot,” he joked.
Next to mugshots for all five officers, who are Black, Hughley pondered why the arrests were so swift. “I’ve gotta wonder why. There’s something about them that looks fast-arrest-worthy,” he deadpanned. “I can’t put my finger on it, but I want to arrest them myself.”
